


Latrodectus

by spiderstanspiderstan



Series: Lycosidae [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Continuation of series, Gen, Rated T for language, Reluctant teamup, concrit wanted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-03-06
Packaged: 2018-09-28 16:36:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10138322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiderstanspiderstan/pseuds/spiderstanspiderstan
Summary: The spiders meet again. They come to an agreement.





	

This was supposed to be _easy_. Boring, easy recon for the sake of pocket change. Nothing about the mission was that interesting, or trying by any means. People playing around alien tech in messy underground engineering labs— dime-a-dozen in New York City.

Natasha had been unwrapping a pallet of raw materials when the row of windows near the ceiling _imploded,_ and two figures tumbled in. A woman with a jetpack, and the _single last person_ she wanted to see.

Natasha watched, looking slack-jawed and shocked, as Spider-Man and the woman in the jetpack wove through the rafters. Peter’s style of movement shifted with the environment— the tight spaces suited him much better than open terrain. It would have been impressive, if it didn’t highlight his total lack of experience in other areas.

She took her _stupidly_ designed pistol from her waistband, poised and ready for action. Her “co-worker”, Sam, snapped to attention and did the same.

“We can’t shoot,” he said. “We might hit Annie.”

“But—” Natasha protested loudly. “He’s all, all buddy-buddy with Tony Stark. He’ll tattle if we don’t do something.”

As she’d expected, Peter turned at the sound of her voice. As she hadn’t, he was distracted enough for the woman wearing the jetpack— Annie, the world’s least threatening supervillain— to hit him. Bursts of purple energy flashed in the air like lightning, following his arc as he swung around a rafter, bounced off the ceiling, and landed on Annie’s back. He tore the jetpack to pieces in a few seconds, and held Annie close, both of them dangling upside down.

“Are you guys seriously running a giant underground operation that makes _jet-packs_ ?” he quipped. “Really? You stole alien tech and you’re making _jet packs_? I mean, good on you for starting your own business, but there’s way cooler stuff on Kickstarter. No offense, but that’s kinda pathetic.”

“Hey, we don’t just make jet packs!” Natasha protested. He was _complicating_ this, and she found it incredibly irritating. “We make guns too.”

She aimed her horribly designed pistol at his webline, and severed it in one shot.

In the space of the second it took to fall tens of feet, Spider-Man chucked Annie at a rafter and webbed her to it, then flipped to land on his feet.

In the middle of the concrete floor.

Where everyone could get to him.

Chaos ensued.

Natasha bolted, sprinting to the iron stairs and flinging herself over the railing to land in the basement. She wasn’t the only one running away, and there was no way this debacle wouldn’t be setting her back by weeks if she didn’t act now. Throwing a bulk of blueprints into a barely-secure chunk of the cloud was usually a last resort, but this wasn’t the type of work that required a high standard.    

On her way back up, she was crushed into the wall by a frenzied employee.

“We need _bigger guns_ ,” he hissed. Natasha ascended the stairs two-by-two, rolled her shoulders back, and prepared to cry if needs be.

The scene she was met with was almost as pathetic as using alien tech to build a jet-pack.Spider-Man was great at dodging in three dimensions. Fantastic. But he had something of an issue with _hordes_ . He could pick off uniformed employees one-by-one, but that was rather useless when he didn’t actually _hurt_ anyone. Sticking people to things was a rather ineffective strategy when there were upwards of a hundred of them.

“Go for the _fucking ankles_ !” Natasha yelled. Instead, Peter used a webline to whip a man through the crowd like a human skip-it, and then yanked him back just before he hit the wall. That was better than doing nothing, but _jesus christ_.

A beam thicker around than her waist illuminated the space, turning the corner of the building where Peter’d been into a weak puff of rubble. The air quivered as if a current was running through it. Natasha glanced at the wielder, noted the ID number on the sleeve of his uniform. Well. He’d certainly found a bigger gun.

Someone had slammed one of the numerous emergency buttons, and metal shutters were descending over the windows. This was not a good day.

“Hey,” Peter landed on the wall beside her, the eyes on his mask screwed almost completely shut. “I know you’re probably, like, busy and stuff, but could you either skedaddle or—” he high-kicked a gun out of someone’s hand, and it clattered sadly to the floor. “Maybe give me a hand here?”

“Well I don’t have a _choice_ now, do I?” Natasha fumed.

She sighed, and turned to the man with the crouching tank of a gun on his shoulder. Then she dislocated his ankles.

It was easier, after that. To go out in a blaze of non-lethal destruction. That was the biggest benefit of helmets. Peter worked faster than she did, even with all the pussyfooting. They reached a tipping point very quickly— where the armed were no longer able to make up for the incapacitated. From then on out, it was like fighting a series of particularly showboaty wet paper bags.

When the last worker was down, Natasha picked her way across the shop floor to Spider-Man, glaring frostily into the eyes of his mask.

“I’m very angry with you,” she said. “For fucking up what I was doing here.”

“That…” Spider-Man said, “is fair. I’m sorry.”

“It’s, what, three thirty in the morning?” Natasha asked, looking for a way out. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

“I don’t have one,” Peter huffed, and shoulder-slammed through the brick wall. “I’m not _five_.”

Natasha hopped deftly through the hole.

“We need to talk,” she told him.

\---

 _Talk_ , in this case, meant lecturing Peter while he tried not to doze off.  Once they’d changed back into civvies and re-grouped at a desolate McDonald’s, another of their (stupidly) policed conversations failed to take off.

Peter had been listlessly chewing the same bit of his McDouble for nearly a full minute when Natasha snapped her fingers in front of his face.  


“At least _try_ and pay attention,” she drawled. “That was a shitshow.”

Natasha had _seen_ him in action before, in news footage and youtube videos, but only once in person. Watching a sustained confrontation had revealed even more holes in his technique.

“I know,” Peter answered. “I— I know. You were doing your spy thing, and then I came and did my not-spy thing, and then everything went to shit. I’m sorry _._ ”

He took another sad bite of processed burger. One of the energy guns had just barely glanced him; a chunk of his hair was slightly singed at the tips.

  
“That’s irrelevant,” Natasha cut in. “If you don't work on your form while fighting, someone is going to kill you.”

The cutting effect was rather diminished by the fact that she took that moment to put a chicken nugget in her mouth whole.

“Nah…” Peter practically slurred, semi-coherent from sleep deprivation. It was _so_ past his bedtime. “I’m gonna— look. I am really, really, hard to kill. I’m like— like a baby. They bounce. But I can literally lift an eighteen-wheeler, and I don’t want to be a mass-murderer. If I wasn’t careful, I’d have a body count as high as you do.”

“Beat the hell out of people, then,” Natasha shrugged, dipping a fry in barbecue sauce. “That’s non-lethal.”

“Once this girl in my class got hit by a car and it cost like, tens of thousands of dollars,” Peter said, looking squeamish. “I can hit someone much harder than a car.”

“You can’t honestly be worried about pushing _criminals_ into medical bankruptcy,” Natasha punctuated the sentence with a long slurp of milkshake, trying to put herself in his form of logic. “The people you’re up against have probably done much worse.”  


Peter glared at her, then crammed all of the apple slices he’d been provided with into his mouth at once.

“If I can stop people with minimal damage, why shouldn’t I?” he replied, irritated. Slivers of quote-unquote “salad” fell from his burger as he switched to holding it one-handed, rubbing his eyes with the other.

“Because damage is being done to _you_ ,” Natasha stated flatly.  “If you want to keep fighting the same people, if you want to keep disarming and abandoning, fine. You don’t have to do anything permanent. But someday, someone will get lucky. You’re not bulletproof, as far as I know.”

She didn’t want him killing people, deliberately or no. But she knew what a brush with death could do to a person. And she knew that being glued to a wall didn’t do much to teach anyone a lesson. Half the time, they weren't even jailed.

“I can _sense impending danger_ , Nat,”  Peter defended. “I don’t— I don’t need to worry about that sort of thing.”

“Can you leap tall buildings in a single bound, too?” Natasha asked, dipping a couple more fries. McDonald’s barbeque sauce was exactly the kind of gluttonous novelty she loved America for. The taste clung, unpleasantly after a while, but in the moment it was fun.“Occasionally dodging bullets is different from being bulletproof. Also,Tony would be really upset if you died.”

Peter looked almost angry at that, his eyebrows drawing together.

“Well, I just _won’t die_ ,” he said, sounding extremely stubborn. “I’ve managed that so far. “

Natasha considered, for a moment, the moral implications of telling a teenager to _start_ hurting people.

“Just—” she started. “Practice. Improve your understanding of your strength until you can properly use it. You’re not as effective as you could be.”

Depending on the parameters, Peter had a near-grotesque amount of potential. She’d seen his range of motion- he failed to utilize about a third of it. Holding back force-wise was understandable, at least—nobody liked putting their fist through a chest cavity. But there was a scale between nothing and a bloodbath, and he’d placed himself very close to the bottom of it.

She had offered to train him, and he'd told her _no_ with the words _I'll think about it_. Then, Tony…

Had been fairly reasonable, all things considered. If Natasha had a friend who couldn’t leave her, she’d want to keep them too.

“I can- I’m _great_ at using my strength, excuse you,” Peter was nearly incomprehensible through the melatonin-induced mush-mouth.“I’m effective. I hit stuff, like all the time…”

He trailed off into a yawn. Had he already stopped sleeping? His career as a vigilante was nowhere near long enough for that, unless he’d created some innovative new system of trauma acquisition that allowed him to cram stressors in to time in the same way a talented chipotle employee could cram ungodly amounts of pulled pork into a burrito.

Then again, Natasha wasn’t exactly a good yardstick for that sort of thing. A lot of effort had gone into preventing her from breaking like that; she’d seen the programs. The nightmares hadn’t come through until adulthood, when she’d shaken her self-brainwashing habit.  

“I’m not saying you’re bad at what you do,” She soothed. “I’m saying that you shouldn't be doing it in the first place-”  

“ _You_ of all people- god, you're worse than Tony,” Peter huffed, cutting her off. “It’s- it’s all ‘oh, you can't do this, you're _fifteen_ and therefore totally braindead’. Like, I got superpowers! I'm gonna be fine. Nobody’s- I'm not stupid. I don't need someone to hold my hand through everything. And- honestly, I'd really appreciate if everybody in the world didn't think they had the _right_ to do that!”  

Natasha paused after the outburst; allowed the silence- or what passed for it in New York City- to build to the point of awkwardness. Peter took a sharp turn from irate to anxious, his angry expression wavering.

“I'm sorry,” he apologised. “It’s- It's just so annoying, you know?”

It was a situational extrapolation of a common, childish sentiment, the type of thing she’d mostly seen on TV. A part of Natasha instinctively wanted to pat him on the head and call him _hun_ ; the kind of condescension she’d seen in response to such behaviour.  

“I'm not telling you to quit being a vigilante,” she appeased. “I'm telling you to quit being a shitty one and get a better strategy.”

When she'd been fifteen- god. She would have slaughtered him, superpowers or no. And she couldn't communicate that without hitting a nerve.

Peter chewed his straw,  halfway between sleepy contemplation and outright sulking.

“I’m…” he made a vague gesture with the cup. “I dunno. You haven’t been me.  Tony hasn’t been me. Why do you get to tell me what to do?”

“Honestly?” Natasha replied. “We don’t want you turning out like we did.”

Peter snorted at that, like she’d said something crazy.

“Tony’s rich and you’re a ninja,” he said. “Ideally I’m gonna get a bit of both.”

“You've spent enough time with Tony to know what I mean.”

The implication took a second to sink in. Peter reacted wordlessly but harshly, curling into defensiveness like a woodlouse curling into a ball.  

“Look,” he said, curling further inwards. “I- I _get_ that you think I can’t handle this. That- that totally makes sense from your perspective. But you- you gotta understand that just ‘cause you got desensitised the hard way- pretty much the hardest way, really- doesn’t mean everyone has to. I’m not- I dunno, _pure._ You gotta stop acting like I am.”

How adorable.

“That’s not what I’m _saying_ ,” Natasha soothed.

She was deeply aware that they were on different wavelengths. Peter’s history was full of the sort of colourful, showy shenanigans that happened when certain types of people got their hands on certain types of power. The confrontations he was involved in tended to look like scenes from a rather dangerous cartoon.

“I’ve…” Peter folded his arms, practically pouting. “My record isn’t as spotless as you think it is. People die ‘cause of me.”

Natasha picked up on the phrasing. Either he was dancing around the word- which was a bit much, even for him, surely- or he didn’t quite believe he’d done it.

  
“How?”

“Negligence.” Peter said, with a kind of self-assured solemnity that he’d probably grow to regret within a year. His voice dripped guilt.

God, he was lucky.

“ _Negligence_ is not a murder weapon,” Natasha said. “And if you think this is, you’re in for one hell of a shock when you actually have to kill someone.”

She was running out of chicken nuggets, and also out of patience. Maybe this was another trait of Tony’s he’d started picking up on. That blinding, obstinate egotism felt almost familiar.

He wasn’t going to be _prepared_.

Peter scowled at her across the greasy plastic table.

“I’m not gonna kill _anyone_ ,” he said. “It’s - this isn’t about experience, okay? It’s about- like, morals. ‘Cause, unlike some people, I actually have morals.”

“That’s admirable,” Natasha said. “And I’m not trying to tell you that’s wrong. Really, that’s ideal. But being as unskilled as you are gives you fewer outs. I can help with that.”

Peter chewed at the skin around his fingernails. His leftmost lower incisor was slightly chipped.

“How do I know that you- that you’re not-”

“That you can trust me?” Natasha said, then shrugged. “Assume you can’t. It’ll make things easier for both of us.”

“See… that, that is _not_ reassuring,” Peter said, suppressing an overtired giggle. He slumped forwards, rested his face in his hands. “I appreciate that.”

“I’m not going to force you to do anything,” Natasha said. She wiped her greasy fingers on a napkin. “But if you want any tips, I’m always here.”

She’d never really tried to pass any of her skills on, before.  

This was going to be interesting.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm supposed to be Lent-ing from fanfiction... But I wrote this on Sunday so suck it
> 
> follow me on my new fic tumblr [here!](http://na-no-why-mo.tumblr.com)


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